Thread 19 - TalkLair: "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 18)

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...

In the TalkLair, the fairy lights are festooned on the mantlepiece, the tree is twinkling with baubles, the mince pies are in the oven, the MN legendary chicken is ready to feed the hordes. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

I get a similar effect by gaining weight, losing it again and regaining it and re-losing it. “Oh hello Fat Pants, haven’t seen you in a while” followed by “hello t shirt I can now wear again once it doesn’t get over-expanded by the norms under it”. And so on.

I've had the opposite feeling, having recently put on quite a spare tyre - I'm blaming menopause (and not the fact that my new job is much more sedentary). We had to go to DH aunt's funeral last week and I thought "Oh I'll wear those smart black trousers that I barely get to wear."

Couldn't do them up.

Couldn't do them up.

I hate it when that happens!

Coming across forgotten stashes of clothes is great, though, especially if they fit. We don't have a lot of space so do a change over of wardrobe twice a year and one time I put a load of summer clothes in a suitcase which then went into the loft and somehow got lost for a few years. Found it again during the latest change over and it was like having new things to wear.

I'm in the nether world between fitting into my thin stuff and not being so overweight that I'm in 100% drawstring waist territory.

So it's like a game of 'can I wear these trousers?' whenever I need to trew up for some reason.

I have clothes in a variety of sizes in drawers around the house that I really need to go through them and get rid of the ones I wouldn’t wear even if I could fit into them. I also need to lose a lot of weight so that some of the good stuff I’m hanging on to can get work again. I’m all about elastic waists though (and have been since the start of the pandemic) so I have the same style of jersey trousers in three different sizes and wear all of them (the biggest size was ordered by accident and is strictly for about the house wear though).

Speaking of seagulls (mentioned on the previous page), we have a lunatic one, pretty much full-size but probably quite young, who sits on a neighbour's roof at the bottom of our garden (we're on a corner) and skrarks for no reason. He (for it is surely a man) is Quite Annoying. Today he moved to our roof and I had to go out and skrark back at him. This freaked him out and he hasn't been back ... yet!

I was staying at a hotel in Cornwall a few years ago. It took a day or two for them to remember that I’m vegetarian and bring me the appropriate canapés. The pleasure of the first evening drink with tasty veggie morsels was marred by a seagull swooping in and nicking my canapés, plate and all!

My (deranged) ex-boss back in the late 20th C was known for quotable rants, one of which 'I hate fucking nature' might have been useful there. As it was for me on Thursday when I went to the back doorstep to get the bag of rather good spag bol sauce I'd taken from the freezer a bit late and left out to defrost, and found some bastard animal had stolen it. 20 minutes since I'd last checked it. Bastard animal.

I think boss was crawled over by an ant.

Sympathies on wildlife-related food thefts! My mum has a lifelong hatred of cats (awkward when she visits us ) and she claims that one reason is she's still bearing the grudge from when the neighbour's cat came into our kitchen and stole an entire raw chicken that was being defrosted on the counter.

FWIW I defrost things in the oven on the "fan only" setting, it really does speed up the process.

We also defrost things outside but haven't, yet, had it be stolen by an animal. I remember my Geordie grandma's fury at finding our cat on her kitchen table gobbling up some ham she'd put out for lunch. It was the way she kept shrieking 'He flew! he flew!' that made it so memorable. That must be over 50 years ago but I can see it like it was yesterday.

Has anyone actually been hot today? It hasn't been much above about 22C here today and is currently down to 18C, with a breeze from the NE (i.e. off the sea, with nothing much between us and Norway). We haven't even needed to turn a fan on, it was too cold for shorts and MrG is wearing a jumper!

I have long since concluded that the BBC weather forecasts are full of nonsense and tend to trust www.yr.no/en ... the plucky Norwegians got it bang on! So I suppose they know what their weather is doing and the wind direction and have no interest in causing alarm and despondency.

Just pleasantly warm here, a bit cloudy at times.

MaBint spent several years tracking multiple weather forecasts and charting predictions against what actually happened. She found Yr.no to be the best. I've been considerably less rigorous, but have noticed it becomes less accurate as you travel.further from.Norway.

I've only looked at yr.no since we lived here - we're about 850km from Stavanger, with nothing but sea in between, which probably helps.

For the next 4 days, the BBC is offering us 25. 27, 26, 28. Meanwhile, yr.no is going for 22, 23, 23, 26. Vamos a ver, as they don't say in Norway.

Today got fairly hot (29) in W London, but as unusually there was an east wind, and my flat is east - west oriented, I could get a nice Through Breeze and was fine. It's now raining very gently which I hope will lower temps from tomorrow's predicted 36.

The rain is also making everything smell amazing in the garden (I was out hacking and slashing when it started) - PETRICHOR ftw!

It’s been hot here (NW London) and set to get a lot worse over the next few days.

I have an array of weather apps on my phone but always check what the Norwegians think. They’re often the most accurate and seldom promise snow they can’t deliver (though obviously that’s not relevant at this time of year).

A little cooler here in NJ today, and now we have a thunderstorm. My two DS’s are at the Norway-Senegal match so I hope they took rain ponchos.

Yr.no is new to me so I shall look at it for a while and see how it compares to other forecasters.

It's been hot here, 29C yesterday and supposed to getting hotter for a few days. I was dripping just standing still. We had a huge thunderstorm last night which lasted about an hour, with many lightning flashes, deafening cracks of thunder and 17.5mm of rain. Of course today will be very humid and feel hotter than ever but it was good to have the rain.

The thunder started here at 4 in the morning (very loud and lots of lightning) and is still rumbling on. Periodically it absolutely chucks down rain for about a minute, then stops. The BBC says it's going to be 25C but the plucky Norwegians offer a more reasonable 21C.

DH has been in A.N.Other City, said it was horribly hot yesterday and then suddenly the heavens opened, biblical rain, flooded roads, plague of frogs... (OK, not the frogs).

It actually wasn't that hot in Leeds yesterday, there was a pretty constant breeze and it was overcast for much of the day. Today is a different story, blazing sunshine outside and even the Norwegians say it'll be 31C by afternoon.

Have to say this is making me rethink the dream of moving back down South. We have miserable winters but at least the summers are less sweltering.

On my trip to London the other day I managed to lose my rather lovely Sex Matters brooch. I emailed them to ask if I could buy a replacement, and got a prompt reply from Emma (Dr. Hilton? Emma-the-work-experience-girl? I dunno) thanking my for my kind words, and saying they will put one in the post for me. So that was nice.

DD1 is going on a school trip to Naples next week, we've been saying how handy it is that she'll be acclimatising to the heat this week

I'm dehydrating some of our raspberry glut. The house smells wonderful.

Gorgeous, I love that smell!

it's hot as flip down here on craggy island. Sweating cobs in my seat as I write this, and expected to be hotter tomorrow etc etc